Example embodiments of inventive concepts described herein relate to systems and methods for searching for documents based on the right to access the documents and types of the documents.
A plurality of documents may be managed in connection with one user account in a blog or a social network service (SNS), and the like. Such documents may be classified and managed for each group by users who have access to the documents. In this case, a system which provides a service may verify a group to which a user belongs, may compare a group which has access to documents with a group to which the user belongs, and may search for documents which are accessible by the user. For example, users may belong to one or more of a plurality of groups including a public group, a friend group, a school group, a company group, a baseball club group, and a family group. One document may be set to be accessible by users of the plurality of groups. In this case, assuming that a user belongs to the friend group and the baseball club group, the system separately searches for documents which are accessible to users of the friend group and documents which are accessible to users of the baseball club group. If identifiers for groups which are granted access certain documents are stored in connection with the documents, the system should separately determine whether an identifier (e.g., “friend”) of the friend group and an identifier (e.g., “baseball club”) of the baseball club group are stored in connection with the documents with respect to each of the documents.
Also, users may inquire about documents of a specific type. For example, it is assumed that types of documents include a photo type, a video type, a location type, and a uniform resource locator (URL) link type. In this case, a document of the photo type may refer to a document including an image such as a photo. A document of the video type may refer to a document including a video. A document of the location type may refer a document including information indicating a specific location such as a latitude/longitude coordinates of an object. A document of the URL type may mean a document including a URL link. If a user wants to inquire about the document of the video type, the system should separately verify documents classified as the video type with respect to all of the documents. For example, if a document A is classified as the video type, it may be stored and managed together with the identifier “video” of the video type. In this case, the system should determine whether the identifier “video” of the video type is stored together in connection with the document A to determine whether the document A is the document of the video type.
When the number of documents managed in connection with a user account increases, the cost of the above-described searches and subsequently granting access to a requested document increases due to the required memory and computational/processing capacity.